project illiteracy

Sure, killer books are great, but what if you could do something with them?

Legend Edition

special edition

Why?

So, let's say you want to make scrolls, or you're using the new spell research model. Maybe you even used that anachronistic press in Dragonborn's Legacy. So you open your craft menu, ready to transcribe your book, but it turns out you need a roll of paper to do that because everyone just assumes you have those (even I'm guilty). But where should you get them? They have almost no vanilla. You can always use tattered books, but why can't you use any of the thirty regular books you might have with you? Does unlimited arcane power really mean less to you than reading 36 sermons?

Or let's say you're using Frostfall and just hanging around Mount Anthor. You're freezing and you want to fire up, but you need some fuel, which you didn't take with you because you thought you'd go forage when needed. But you don't have time to forage now; the exposure has flickered and the only way to be safe is to light a fire now. You have some really good books, but you can't use them because they won't be destroyed. Clearly, you value the sanctity of books in your own life.

Well, I won’t say anymore! Lower the literacy rate! Long live practicality and illiteracy!

outside the box

Gain new powers - "Destroy Books"

Scrolls can be destroyed by any book in Skyrim or DLC. Picture your macho northern savage just taking that book and ripping it open. yes. Just really chop that thing up. Manliness.

Longer books will give you more paper rolls. That's right, you'll definitely find less blood-stained notes scrawled on some guy's corpse than a legendary article about defeating the Tribunal using Tiber Septim - and of course, you get more paper out of those books.

But wait! That's not all!

Dynamic patching! Do you know how many mods add books? Like maybe a book or two added to my half load order. Why can't I burn those?

You totally can! All literacy must be cleared!

xEdit patching: Copy the "Edit Scripts" folder from this mod to the Tes5Edit folder. Then paste the entire load sequence into Tes5Edit, right-click and select "Apply Script" and then Generate Project Illiteracy.

zEdit patching: Add ProjectIlliteracyPatcher *.zip as a module to zEdit, then build zPatch. It was easier <then>! Always remember to thank mator for writing a lot of Pascal so the rest of us don't have to.

That’s all! That's all it takes to ruin every book in Skyrim!

Order now and we'll provide free campfire support!

If you are running Campfire, the xEdit script will automatically detect and generate recipes for burning fuel and replenishing fire books. Campfire is a soft dependency in the script, so if you don't use Campfire, the script will still work. Note that to avoid cluttering your crafting list in the event of a fire, you can only burn books within 60 seconds of using the Destroy Books power supply. Trust me, it's much better this way.

Due to the way this is implemented, a fire that destroys you may give you some tattered books instead of the original ones. I think that's fair, setting them on fire almost ruined the book.

Installation and usage instructions:

Install, download and install using the mod manager of your choice, or install, download and install manually if you don't want to overwrite important assets. Move the Edit Scripts folder from Archive to the xEdit folder.

Using the Generate Project Illiteracy script will generate the second esp. This is safe to merge with the original esp, but for ease of use this is not recommended as your patch will most likely rely on much of your load order - if you wanted to remove a mod that added a book you would have to regenerate the patch and rebuild the merge.

Each time you run the script, you intend to generate a new patch. Running the script when a patch already exists will create duplicate recipes.

You can destroy books that are quest items with this mod. There is no way to differentiate within the xEdit script. Ob …